Parse.ly

Parse.ly, a part of WordPress VIP, is the real-time content measurement layer for the entire web. Our analytics platform helps digital storytellers at some of the web’s best sites, such as Arstechnica, The New Yorker, TechCrunch, Wired, The Intercept, Slate, and many more. In total, our analytics system handles over 65 billion monthly events from over 1 billion monthly unique visitors. Parse.ly and WordPress VIP are part of Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Simplenote, Jetpack, Longreads, Day One, PocketCasts, and more, with a mission to make the web a better place. Automattic is a distributed and global-first company, with more than 1900 Automatticians in 96 countries speaking 120+ different languages.

With 40% year-on-year growth, we are expanding our team and looking for engineers to join us. 

Our engineering teams

Platform Engineering

The platform team is responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the development solutions for the Parse.ly real-time analytics systems. The team applies DevOps and SRE practices such as Infrastructure-as-code, automation, pervasive monitoring/alerting, and close collaboration with application engineers. The team works with the Parse.ly Backend, Frontend, and Machine Learning Engineers and owns Parse.ly’s distributed cloud environment. This environment involves 400+ servers running in 9 Availability Zones and 3 Regions in Amazon Web Services (AWS). It also includes AWS-managed services such as RDS, EMR, ElastiCache, and Athena.

Parse.ly’s platform engineering team already makes use of technologies like CI/CD, Ansible, Terraform, Nomad, Docker, and AWS services to maintain Parse.ly’s infrastructure and security.

Our platform engineers:

• Implement and manage infrastructure as code practices using Terraform and Ansible to automate the provisioning and configuration of resources. Ensure scalability and reliability of our cloud infrastructure platform AWS.​​
• Develop and maintain monitoring and observability solutions using tools like Datadog, Grafana, log management, and traces to track platform performance and health, and report on enhancements to key Service-Level Objectives (SLOs)
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines to automate the build, test, and deployment processes with GitLab CI.
• Work with developers to establish practices for deploying and managing apps. Help them use containerization tech such as Docker and Nomad for reliable and scalable app deployment.
• Gain operational expertise for core data infrastructure technologies, including Amazon S3, Kafka, Zookeeper, Storm, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Redis, Postgres, and Spark.
• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation.

Backend Engineering

Parse.ly’s backend engineering team currently makes use of data engineering technologies like Apache Spark, Storm, Kafka, and Elasticsearch to analyze large datasets. Backend Software Engineers at Parse.ly are expected to master these technologies, while also being able to write code against them in Python.

Our team is responsible for providing a real-time analytics infrastructure that processes over 2 million page views per minute from over 5,000 high-traffic sites. It operates a fleet of cloud servers that include thousands of cores for live data processing. We have written publicly about mage, our time series analytics engine. This will give you an idea about the kinds of systems we work on.

Our backend engineers:

• Write Python code using standard methodologies. See The Elements of Python Style, written by our founding CTO, for an example of our approach to code readability and design.
• Analyze data at an extensive scale. They are comfortable with the idea of your code running across 3,000 Python cores, thanks to process-level parallelization.
• Brainstorm new product ideas and directions with the team and customers.They are good communicators, especially in written form.
• Master cloud technologies and systems. They love UNIX and are able to reason about distributed systems. Their favorite book might be Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA).
• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation.

Parse.ly Technology Stack

We currently adopt the following technologies across the Parse.ly platform:

• Python & JavaScript
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Databases like Elasticsearch, Redis, Cassandra, and Postgres
• Frameworks like Django, FastAPI, and the PyData stack (e.g. Pandas)
• Kafka, Storm, Spark in production atop large data sets (terabytes per day)
• System management with Ansible, Terraform, and Nomad
• Containerized workloads and services

If you’re an engineer looking for an aspiring and rewarding career move, we would love to hear from you by telling us more about yourself on the form below.